Michael1942's Blog

Democracy has come to Head Start! The employees of the Head Start program have issued a resounding yes to having union representation. The Springfield Urban League (grant administrator) “terminated” 200 plus employees in June in order to save the money that would have been paid towards the COBRA of normally “laid off” workers. The US Health care bill mandated that employers who lay workers off will have pay a portion of their COBRA, the Urban league skirted that issue by terminating the employees then saying that this was normal practice. The normal practice has always been been a “layoff” of 9 month employees. The League then began a campaign of ridding themselves of vocal employees and dissidents. Once management was notified that the employees had petitioned to have union representation, the war began. They (management) not so systematically eliminated as many job titles as possible to dilute the voting pool. The next step was the campaign of words, which for the most part were untrue and threatening. This barrage of words and actions served to consolidate the workers into a solid block for unionization. This past week the election results showed that democracy lives in Springfield, at least at Head Start.